HTML was not intended to describe the look of a page. So what? It was used for that and it did the job pretty well. There are many things in the world that are used in other ways as the original design.
The basic function of stylesheets is the same as what you are using constants for in a program: replacing duplicates with a central copy. But in programming no one would use constants if there is no problem with duplicates.
Compare this with the font problem. There is no reason why <font> and <style font=> couldn't be synonymes. It would make the browser simpler, it would provide backward compatibility, it would make (X)html files simpler and shorter. One could go on: there is no reason why the syntax of a stylesheet is so different from HTML.
XHTML/CSS is for me a very complicated way to solve a very simple problem.
A few weeks ago I checked the internet for the outsourcing sites. I was really amazed at the prices quoted (for example: an Outlook clone for a few hundred dollars). So I wondered how this works in real life and what experiences people have with those services.
> It must be from 3-4 minutes long. This one is > almost completely rigid, completely artificial, > and one of my most hated constraints.
For radio this is perfectly logical. For each song there are people who love it and people who hate it. If the song takes too long the people who hate it will look for another station and the people who found it so-so will get bored.
Well start thinking about things anonymous phonecalls are used for: tips to the police, tips to newspapers, situations where your personal e-mail is irrelevant because you send the mail on behalf of some organisation.
Think too about how many people have their phonenumber shielded so that no one can see it.
And last but not least: posting this as an Anonymous Coward doesn't add to your credibility on this subject;-)
There are times when people want to sent legitimate anonymous e-mails. I don't think that disabling that is the way to go. Besides that: most people look to the sender, not the e-mail address before they open an e-mail, so this will have limited value. And as you see: Spamhous has other ways to find out who did it. Another problem is that some addresses like Hotmail aren't bound to a provider (and DNS).
Instead I think it is better to work on the link between the hacked computer and the provider. Maybe your provider gives you a provider-specific program you have to install and that verifies that mail is sent the right way. Maybe in the future when your computer works as a spam relayer, the provider will send an e-mail: "Your computer has been found to relay spam, probably due to a virus or malicious software you have downloaded. Please remove the problem and notice us when this has been done. In the mean time your mail will be filtered. Only mail that contains the string 'ABC123' will be let through."
The biggest is advantage of Mono is that it will be easy to port Windows applications to Linux. I can't imagine Microsoft telling Adobe that it may no longer sell it's Linux/Mono port of Photoshop because of some MS patent. That would be war.
The GPL employs the same much-to-long copyrights as the rest of the world. In order to be really free the GPL should contain a clause that the software becomes public domain after 10 years.
Software is not about big ideas, it is about implementation. I wouldn't know one software company that has become big on a patented idea. On the contrary: people who have the first implementation usually fail.
However, you shouldn't regret those first comers too much. Just talk to some smart programmers and you will showered with vague ideas of big new implementations. The people who make the first implementations are actually the second phase in how software develops.
E-bay is a very good example. With their perfectionism they took online auctions to the next level and in the process they got the market.
Microsoft is the king of implementation. Sure, they need a few versions to get there, but the always end up with the best implementation.
I am sorry to see that Microsoft has by now so many legal bruises that they even have a hard day in court when justice is on their side.
Nice rant, boy! But if the end result is those Intertrust guys claiming money for XP's product activation I think something has been lost in the process. You don't need a PhD to think up that kind of stuff. The other claims seem similar.
I just read an old Register interview (2001) where Intertrust director Ed Fish explained why they didn't ask for a prelimminary injunction At that time:
Preliminary injunctions are most likely to be asked for and granted when a company's core business is in clear and present danger, and InterTrust clearly does not think this is the case. Microsoft's rights management efforts are currently a moving target, with Fish observing that Media Player and e-book technologies are incompatible with one another, and the Common Language Runtime is different again. Under these cicumstances the big pay-off in the rights management arena is still some distance away: "the hockey stick is 24-36 months in the future."
Linux is just Linux and Perl is just Perl. They are just two nice little pieces of software that Amazon is using. Sure, they are making a lot from what they have built on top of that. But that is their right. Wasn't opensource about freedom? I think we should be glad if Amazon reports a Linux bug if they find one.
O'Reilly is right that data collections like Yahoo maps, E-bay and Amazon are the future. However, he is wrong about the answer. We will have to collect our own data. And just as with the software it may take some legal experimenting before we find the right formula.
There will be some setbacks like CDDB, but we can overcome that.
Also I am not very worried about the fact that the first implementations of such collections are commercial. The power of the opensource/opencontent is not in being first. It is in being with many and in being volunteers who provide things for free. We are a herd: slow to react, but impossible to resist.
Let me just do some guesswork how the answers might look like:
- Amazon: for the book evaluations we might have some open alternative that gets supported by a lot of smaller vendors. Just as with Netscape one vendor (maybe Borders) might pay the bills and let the others have a free ride just to get access to a wider public.
- Yahoo maps: at some point all software about maps will be standardized. At that point it might very well happen that the real providers of the data in the maps - mainly government agencies - take over.
- E-bay. E-bay doesn't have a real data collection. It is just the place where everyone goes, just as Slashdot is the place where everyone goes when they want a certain type of discussion. But this is a rather delicate position. It is just as with pubs or search websites: for years one is the most popular and then at once there is a shift.
I really hate those popup advertisements that Google searches give me nowadays. Or is that a function from the Google Toolbar?
So some competition would be good.
Opensource music is not the way to go.
on
Open Source Music
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· Score: 1
I am myself working on Classiccat.net, an index of classical music on the internet. Some of the music is hosted by the artists themselves, others are on mp3.com, Vitaminic, etc. I don't care under what license people release their music. They make it available to listen to freely and that is all that most people care about.
When I look at free music I see the cost of hosting as the main obstacle. Unfortunately up to now their isn't opensource software to help this. Stuff like BitTorrent doesn't give the original host the option to control the copyright and to withdraw the music if it wants so. My ideal kind of software would be so that even companies as mp3.com would use it if they could find the volunteers for hosting. Such kind of software could become the basis on which many music sites could be founded.
As for licenses: I don't think it is very important that musicians give up all rights on their music - as opensource advocates would like to see. Instead I would like to see the establishment of some registry where musicians could register under what license they release their music. They should also be able to change their license, for example withdrawing their music from free distribution if they want so. Such a license should be simple and the accent should be on things that people want to do with their music, like using it on internet radio (or even real radio) and as samples.
I doubt he is this footbal guy. Some searching on the net gives that he came to Uniforum/interforum from ICL. At ICL his last job was director of the smartcard business. He did that from june 2000 until mid 2001.
After that he started his own consulting business: Fonteau Business Associates, that seems to be a one man show.
I once researched the financials of the dutch organisation that claims to represent opensource here in Holland: the VOSN. Their main income was from some big corporations and the government and their main expenses were to some "experts" who charged about 150 dollars an hour for writing some reports. (Their financial information seems to be offline now.) The VOSN too had in the past some dubious remarks about software patents.
I see both OpenSoftwareEurope and VOSN as started by software consultants who discovered that some money was to be made in open source. When they have questions that they don't know they won't contact any of those underpaid volunteers who wrote it, but instead they call their marketing friends at IBM.
This doesn't mean that these organisations are bad. Actually, it seems that the VOSN has worked towards a broader basis after the upheaval caused by its software patent opinions. Lets hope we can teach OpenSoftwareEurope too.
Remember this when you hear about China being the next "superpower". China has shown little interest in what happens outside their region. If they had Taiwan they would be pretty much content.
Only Taiwan? You forget that China has borderclaims on most of its neighbours: Vietnam, India, Russia and the Philippines. Just a few years ago they pressured one of the former Sovjet states (Kirgizistan if I remember well) to hand over a large piece of uninhabited mountainland.
In the past the Chinese were active in faraway countries like Tanzania and Albania too. For the moment they are no match for the US, but that doesn't mean that they don't have the ambition to be a worldpower too.
Holland's most consumer unfriendly ISP
on
Games on Demand
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· Score: 1
Planet is Holland's most consumer unfriendly ISP. Over several years it has never been able to get the binary newsgroups working (many messages are missing) and as a matter of routine it denies to have received mail that it doesn't like - like complaints and cancellations.
It amazes me that they get a chance to promote themselves at Slashdot.
You can't compensate for customers that don't buy anymore. But you can give the company some kind of purpose - so that people don't feel lost anymore.
A manager could redefine the company so that people see a future for it. It could specialize. People could get trained so that a department becomes better and better. Such a specialization could even help when the layoff go on, because it will improve the chances for a new job.
Even a low level employee could help building such a view. Try to find collegues gor exchanging ideas and build your own "center of excellence". With a sense of purpose and collaboration even mediocre employees can achieve good results - provided the motivation is there.
The chemical weapons that Saddam has are only for local use so to label them as weapons of mass destruction is a lie. They are not more lethal as a couple of bombers and nobody calls those weapons of mass destruction.
I am more afraid of Bush with his threats to use nuclear arms and his plans to use non-letal battle gasses (forbidden by international conventions). Bush is definitely more out of control as Saddam.
As Britney is on the radio regularly everyone can tape her there. So nobody really needs to download mp3s to burn cds with her songs. So the RIAA won't achieve much for Britney even if they succeed in stopping mp3 downloading.
On the other hand less known artists will lose exposure and sales if mp3 downloading is stopped.
As anybody with a good graphic feeling can tell you: there is a difference in quality between one graphic card and the other - even if they have the same graphic processor. This is due to differences in other - often analog - parts of a graphic card.
As we all see colors a bit different (not just the color blind people), it is impossible to say absolutely that one card is better than the other.
This creates the climate where branding is important. Sure, the expensive brands tend to use better parts and have on average a bit superior quality. But you pay also for the cost of advertising and being first to market.
The sham of pseudo-deregulation (such as what happened with the airlines, etc), is not proper deregulation in that there is still no equal playing field and equal access to all resources to be competed for.
Pray and believe and miracles will happen. If miracles don't happen there must be something wrong with your faith!!!
And so we hear it all the time from the believers: if it didn't work it wasn't done right. I think that all those incidents aren't just incidents. They are a symptom of the fact that deregulation makes things more difficult to regulate. Have a nationalized railways: easy and straighforward to manage. Now privatise it: you need rules to prevent the companies from overcharging and otherwise mistreating customers, you need rules and inspections for safety and if you ever want some new railroad built you will spend centuries negotiating it with all the companies involved.
So deregulation means actually more rules. That's why it is such a bad idea to force developing countries to deregulate. They already have trouble enough enforcing their own simple rules. With the new more complicated rules of deregulation it turns into a mess.
Netcaspe was a typical company that did not have a "sustainable business".
Sure, nobody could know that their browser was so horribly programmed that they were bound to loose the feature war with Microsoft. But even without that problem Microsoft would have given them a hard fight and their chances for making a profit within a few years were slim.
I guess too many people couldn't imagine that you could have millions of users and a 90% market share and yet have no chance of making a profit.
It has some tips on selecting your surgeon.
It notes that having an experienced surgeon can make a major difference in the risk on complications.
Also it is important to realize that not every eye is suitable for surgery. Some surgeons reject a third of their applicants for surgery. Those unsuitable eyes (for example with a too thin cornea) are the biggest cause of complications. And not every surgeon is critical enough.
Slashdot Mirror
HTML was not intended to describe the look of a page. So what? It was used for that and it did the job pretty well. There are many things in the world that are used in other ways as the original design.
The basic function of stylesheets is the same as what you are using constants for in a program: replacing duplicates with a central copy. But in programming no one would use constants if there is no problem with duplicates.
Compare this with the font problem. There is no reason why <font> and <style font=> couldn't be synonymes. It would make the browser simpler, it would provide backward compatibility, it would make (X)html files simpler and shorter. One could go on: there is no reason why the syntax of a stylesheet is so different from HTML.
XHTML/CSS is for me a very complicated way to solve a very simple problem.
A few sites:
> It must be from 3-4 minutes long. This one is
> almost completely rigid, completely artificial,
> and one of my most hated constraints.
For radio this is perfectly logical. For each song there are people who love it and people who hate it. If the song takes too long the people who hate it will look for another station and the people who found it so-so will get bored.
Well start thinking about things anonymous phonecalls are used for: tips to the police, tips to newspapers, situations where your personal e-mail is irrelevant because you send the mail on behalf of some organisation.
Think too about how many people have their phonenumber shielded so that no one can see it.
And last but not least: posting this as an Anonymous Coward doesn't add to your credibility on this subject;-)
Instead I think it is better to work on the link between the hacked computer and the provider. Maybe your provider gives you a provider-specific program you have to install and that verifies that mail is sent the right way. Maybe in the future when your computer works as a spam relayer, the provider will send an e-mail: "Your computer has been found to relay spam, probably due to a virus or malicious software you have downloaded. Please remove the problem and notice us when this has been done. In the mean time your mail will be filtered. Only mail that contains the string 'ABC123' will be let through."
The biggest is advantage of Mono is that it will be easy to port Windows applications to Linux. I can't imagine Microsoft telling Adobe that it may no longer sell it's Linux/Mono port of Photoshop because of some MS patent. That would be war.
The GPL employs the same much-to-long copyrights as the rest of the world. In order to be really free the GPL should contain a clause that the software becomes public domain after 10 years.
With Os X and Linux sharing much of the same code and structure it should be possible to create a development system that works for both.
That would double the market share and would make it attractive for companies like Adobe and Macromedia to join.
Software is not about big ideas, it is about implementation. I wouldn't know one software company that has become big on a patented idea. On the contrary: people who have the first implementation usually fail.
However, you shouldn't regret those first comers too much. Just talk to some smart programmers and you will showered with vague ideas of big new implementations. The people who make the first implementations are actually the second phase in how software develops.
E-bay is a very good example. With their perfectionism they took online auctions to the next level and in the process they got the market.
Microsoft is the king of implementation. Sure, they need a few versions to get there, but the always end up with the best implementation.
I am sorry to see that Microsoft has by now so many legal bruises that they even have a hard day in court when justice is on their side.
I just read an old Register interview (2001) where Intertrust director Ed Fish explained why they didn't ask for a prelimminary injunction At that time:
Preliminary injunctions are most likely to be asked for and granted when a company's core business is in clear and present danger, and InterTrust clearly does not think this is the case. Microsoft's rights management efforts are currently a moving target, with Fish observing that Media Player and e-book technologies are incompatible with one another, and the Common Language Runtime is different again. Under these cicumstances the big pay-off in the rights management arena is still some distance away: "the hockey stick is 24-36 months in the future."
I don't like this kind of business ethics!!!
Linux is just Linux and Perl is just Perl. They are just two nice little pieces of software that Amazon is using. Sure, they are making a lot from what they have built on top of that. But that is their right. Wasn't opensource about freedom? I think we should be glad if Amazon reports a Linux bug if they find one.
O'Reilly is right that data collections like Yahoo maps, E-bay and Amazon are the future. However, he is wrong about the answer. We will have to collect our own data. And just as with the software it may take some legal experimenting before we find the right formula.
There will be some setbacks like CDDB, but we can overcome that.
Also I am not very worried about the fact that the first implementations of such collections are commercial. The power of the opensource/opencontent is not in being first. It is in being with many and in being volunteers who provide things for free. We are a herd: slow to react, but impossible to resist.
Let me just do some guesswork how the answers might look like:
- Amazon: for the book evaluations we might have some open alternative that gets supported by a lot of smaller vendors. Just as with Netscape one vendor (maybe Borders) might pay the bills and let the others have a free ride just to get access to a wider public.
- Yahoo maps: at some point all software about maps will be standardized. At that point it might very well happen that the real providers of the data in the maps - mainly government agencies - take over.
- E-bay. E-bay doesn't have a real data collection. It is just the place where everyone goes, just as Slashdot is the place where everyone goes when they want a certain type of discussion. But this is a rather delicate position. It is just as with pubs or search websites: for years one is the most popular and then at once there is a shift.
I really hate those popup advertisements that Google searches give me nowadays. Or is that a function from the Google Toolbar?
So some competition would be good.
When I look at free music I see the cost of hosting as the main obstacle. Unfortunately up to now their isn't opensource software to help this. Stuff like BitTorrent doesn't give the original host the option to control the copyright and to withdraw the music if it wants so. My ideal kind of software would be so that even companies as mp3.com would use it if they could find the volunteers for hosting. Such kind of software could become the basis on which many music sites could be founded.
As for licenses: I don't think it is very important that musicians give up all rights on their music - as opensource advocates would like to see. Instead I would like to see the establishment of some registry where musicians could register under what license they release their music. They should also be able to change their license, for example withdrawing their music from free distribution if they want so. Such a license should be simple and the accent should be on things that people want to do with their music, like using it on internet radio (or even real radio) and as samples.
After that he started his own consulting business: Fonteau Business Associates, that seems to be a one man show.
I once researched the financials of the dutch organisation that claims to represent opensource here in Holland: the VOSN. Their main income was from some big corporations and the government and their main expenses were to some "experts" who charged about 150 dollars an hour for writing some reports. (Their financial information seems to be offline now.) The VOSN too had in the past some dubious remarks about software patents.
I see both OpenSoftwareEurope and VOSN as started by software consultants who discovered that some money was to be made in open source. When they have questions that they don't know they won't contact any of those underpaid volunteers who wrote it, but instead they call their marketing friends at IBM.
This doesn't mean that these organisations are bad. Actually, it seems that the VOSN has worked towards a broader basis after the upheaval caused by its software patent opinions. Lets hope we can teach OpenSoftwareEurope too.
that Bush is the reincarnation of McCarthy.
Only Taiwan? You forget that China has borderclaims on most of its neighbours: Vietnam, India, Russia and the Philippines. Just a few years ago they pressured one of the former Sovjet states (Kirgizistan if I remember well) to hand over a large piece of uninhabited mountainland.
In the past the Chinese were active in faraway countries like Tanzania and Albania too. For the moment they are no match for the US, but that doesn't mean that they don't have the ambition to be a worldpower too.
Planet is Holland's most consumer unfriendly ISP. Over several years it has never been able to get the binary newsgroups working (many messages are missing) and as a matter of routine it denies to have received mail that it doesn't like - like complaints and cancellations.
It amazes me that they get a chance to promote themselves at Slashdot.
You can't compensate for customers that don't buy anymore. But you can give the company some kind of purpose - so that people don't feel lost anymore.
A manager could redefine the company so that people see a future for it. It could specialize. People could get trained so that a department becomes better and better. Such a specialization could even help when the layoff go on, because it will improve the chances for a new job.
Even a low level employee could help building such a view. Try to find collegues gor exchanging ideas and build your own "center of excellence". With a sense of purpose and collaboration even mediocre employees can achieve good results - provided the motivation is there.
The chemical weapons that Saddam has are only for local use so to label them as weapons of mass destruction is a lie. They are not more lethal as a couple of bombers and nobody calls those weapons of mass destruction.
I am more afraid of Bush with his threats to use nuclear arms and his plans to use non-letal battle gasses (forbidden by international conventions). Bush is definitely more out of control as Saddam.
As Britney is on the radio regularly everyone can tape her there. So nobody really needs to download mp3s to burn cds with her songs. So the RIAA won't achieve much for Britney even if they succeed in stopping mp3 downloading.
On the other hand less known artists will lose exposure and sales if mp3 downloading is stopped.
I can't take this article serious. It has not one word about downloading music.
I guess this guy doesn't have a clue what people are doing on the internet.
As anybody with a good graphic feeling can tell you: there is a difference in quality between one graphic card and the other - even if they have the same graphic processor. This is due to differences in other - often analog - parts of a graphic card.
As we all see colors a bit different (not just the color blind people), it is impossible to say absolutely that one card is better than the other.
This creates the climate where branding is important. Sure, the expensive brands tend to use better parts and have on average a bit superior quality. But you pay also for the cost of advertising and being first to market.
Pray and believe and miracles will happen. If miracles don't happen there must be something wrong with your faith!!!
And so we hear it all the time from the believers: if it didn't work it wasn't done right. I think that all those incidents aren't just incidents. They are a symptom of the fact that deregulation makes things more difficult to regulate. Have a nationalized railways: easy and straighforward to manage. Now privatise it: you need rules to prevent the companies from overcharging and otherwise mistreating customers, you need rules and inspections for safety and if you ever want some new railroad built you will spend centuries negotiating it with all the companies involved.
So deregulation means actually more rules. That's why it is such a bad idea to force developing countries to deregulate. They already have trouble enough enforcing their own simple rules. With the new more complicated rules of deregulation it turns into a mess.
Netcaspe was a typical company that did not have a "sustainable business".
Sure, nobody could know that their browser was so horribly programmed that they were bound to loose the feature war with Microsoft. But even without that problem Microsoft would have given them a hard fight and their chances for making a profit within a few years were slim.
I guess too many people couldn't imagine that you could have millions of users and a 90% market share and yet have no chance of making a profit.
It has some tips on selecting your surgeon. It notes that having an experienced surgeon can make a major difference in the risk on complications.
Also it is important to realize that not every eye is suitable for surgery. Some surgeons reject a third of their applicants for surgery. Those unsuitable eyes (for example with a too thin cornea) are the biggest cause of complications. And not every surgeon is critical enough.